I still have a machine running XP. It's my old gaming rig, an AMD 64 X2 4400+ with 2GB of RAM and a GTX 260. I set it up for my niece to play games on. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it when XP support ends. I did put Windows 7 on it when I pulled it out and re-assembled it for her to use. There's one driver for it that is pre-Win7, and I think I used a driver for Windows Vista. It worked, but I didn't feel like wasting the license on it, so I put XP on it.

I thought about building a new machine for myself and letting her use my current system before XP expired, but I don't feel like I need a new machine yet. It's almost 4 years old with a few upgrades along the way like a GTX 660 and bumping the RAM from 4GB to 12GB. There aren't any games that really tax the system, and I'm running it at stock speed (Core i5 750 @ 2.66GHz).

Beamer wrote on Mar 2, 2014, 18:56:How often do you guys print things?

I don't print a whole lot which is why I bought a laser printer+scanner several years ago. My mom on the other hand, if she had a printer she would probably print out everything on the internet. She is always wanting me to print stuff out for her. I got her a tablet a few years ago, and she'll forward emails to me asking me to print it out so she can have a copy to save. I keep telling her she doesn't need to print them out, they'll stay in her gmail archive unless she deletes them.

After college when I didn't need to print a lot of stuff anymore, I discovered that the ink cartridges would dry out after ~3 months whether you use them or not, and it seemed like every time I needed to print something the cartridge had dried out. I got tired of paying $30 per cartridge and only printing half a dozen or so pages per cartridge.

The laser printer cost me $90, and I believe it even had a mail-in rebate. It came with a starter toner cartridge good for ~50 pages. I lucked up because CompUSA went out of business shortly after buying the printer. We don't have one locally, but I happened to be in a city with one on their last day. I drove by and they had a sign saying last day of business everything 90% off. I found 4 toner cartridges for my printer and bought them all. I think they're good for 5000 pages each, so I'm set for life and then some on toner.

jdreyer wrote on Feb 18, 2014, 19:57:GODDAMMIT. Another Humble Bundle full of stuff I want: Swapper, Antichamber, Monaco, Dust. *sigh*

For me it's GODDAMMIT. Another Humble bundle full of games I already have and only one game I want. I think the last three bundles have been like that, and the only game I want and don't have was in the BTA tier. At least this time it's in the name your price tier, so I guess I can toss in a few bucks to get it.

The title had me worried for a second. When read the title the first thought that came to mind was that they were having cash problems from over designing the game due to all of the stretch goals. I'm glad they're taking the time to do it right and not rushing.

I just hope all of these big Kickstarted RPGs I backed (Wasteland 2, Project Eternity, Torment: Tides of Numenera, Divinity: Original Sin) aren't come out at the same time. It looks like WL2 and DOS might be coming out pretty close together though.

I'm glad Uplay isn't required, but I got off the Uplay hate wagon a while back. I can understand the complaint of buying an Ubisoft game on Steam and having to go through both Steam and Uplay, which is why I decided to buy Farcry 3 and Blood Dragon Uplay keys instead of Steam keys from Amazon during the winter sale. Uplay isn't bad, and it has never stopped me from playing either of those games.

I hope SP:SOT turns out good, but I'm not pre-ordering it, especially for $60. Not when Wasteland 2 and Divinity Original Sin are right around the corner. I've already put ~40 combined hours into the alpha versions of them.

ItBurn wrote on Feb 2, 2014, 16:14:I haven't played vanilla Minecraft in... like a year. They BARELY update the game. Mojang is doing a TERRIBLE job updating the game. Modders are doing all of the work. Trust me, play with mods, it's the only way. There are mod packs with their own launchers that auto-download everything and set themselves up for you.

They release minor patches about once a month, and major patches about every 3 months. The last 3 major patches have added new bioms and blocks, which as I said, are only available in newly generated terrain or new worlds. It's the same or worse with mods. Any new features added in the world generator can only be acquired by traveling to newly generated terrain or starting a new world.

I bought Minecraft while it was in Beta, and I've grown tired of it. I'm not bored with it, I'm just tired of starting over after each patch. I know you don't have to start over, but they keep adding new features to the world, which is awesome that they're still adding content, but you can't get in an existing game unless you travel out past land that has already been generated.

As with most games, it's best played with friends. I played it with a couple of friends when I first got it. We played the hell out of it up until the last beta update before 1.0. That was when they rewrote the world generator and added a lot of new things. We had build a lot of cool stuff and had a rail system running between all of our buildings and mine sites. It was cool, but when this new version came out we decided to start over so we could play with the new stuff. After a few days we quit playing together. I was kind of excited to start fresh, but we did miss our old world. I think it was a combination of missing the old world and everything we built, the idea of having to do it all again from scratch and starting in a crappy swamp biome, the others decided to call it quits. I continued to play alone for a while.

Once 1.0 or so came out, I played a survival game with the goal of going to the End World and killing the Ender Dragon. That wasn't that hard, and I don't see the need to do it again. I started a few solo games with the intent on playing survival and building stuff, but then each time they add some new feature, I'd want to start over so I could have that in my world. Eventually I just got tired of starting over, so now I'm waiting for things to settle down before I go back to it.

I loved SiN back in the day. I have it on Steam, but I don't know if it has the expansion pack. I think it came with the pre-order of the SiN Episodes. I thought it was available by itself on Steam, but I don't see it. SiN Episode one was good, it sucks that they didn't continue it. Someone should remake the original SiN in Source like Black Mesa did for Half-Life (except don't take 10 fucking years).

jdreyer wrote on Jan 30, 2014, 14:01:Was I the only one to read this great article on KSP that Blue posted in Interviews last night?

I read it (I was the one to submit it).

1badmf wrote on Jan 30, 2014, 14:12:i read half of it, why? KSP is great, but i still feel it's missing... something. narrative i think. right now it's a great educational tool and should be adopted by all schools like oregon trail was, but it needs narrative to be a proper game. like a space race to save the planet from something.

Keep reading. Go down to the section titled "Separation Stage" where they talk about a mission pack being made in partnership with NASA for KSP that challenges players to land a Kerbal on an asteroid. They're also creating an educational version of KSP for schools.

The game is still in Alpha. They just implemented the first part of the career mode a few months ago. They are planning to introduce currency and expand the career mode to include contracts in next version. I don't see why you can't give yourself a challenge to complete using sandbox mode though. That's what I did before career mode.

The game already supports custom scenarios. A teacher can create a scenario with a crashed ship on the Mun and challenge the kids to build a rescue ship to rescue the stranded crew. I believe with scenarios you can limit the parts available, and when currency is added, you can give them a budget as well. So you can challenge kids to do something, and whoever does it with the lowest budget wins.

InBlack wrote on Jan 29, 2014, 09:45:Duke3d was cool and fun. Doom2's multiplayer was better from a purely competitive outlook, but yeah....Hail to the King Baby!

I remember tying up the phone for hours every night playing Doom2 coop with a friend. I actually owe Doom2 a thanks because many of my best friends that I still keep in touch with I met due to Doom2. There was a local BBS in town back then that had a deal where you could leave a message for other people to see when they logged off. Just for the hell of it, I posted a Doom2 challenge and left my phone number.

That one message eventually led to a small group of us having little tournaments over the phone, then on to 6 of us starting our first LAN party. A few years later we were having ~20ish people weekly LAN parties playing Quake. It started out with just our group, and then someone would invite a friend, then that friend would invite a friend. Eventually word spread around town and other people just started showing up.

Those were the best days. With internet now I can jump in a game with 64 player with VOIP any time I want, but it just isn't the same. Nothing beats being in the same room with 20 other people playing the game and yelling across the room.

The first LAN party my friends and I ever setup was to play Duke Nukem 3D. Setting up a network in DOS was a bitch. If I remember, Duke3D only supported up to 4 players, and it was just death match. We tried to do our own 2v2 team DM, but we kept killing each other because everyone was different colors.

nin wrote on Jan 22, 2014, 19:40:Think the most I ever paid for a video card was either $400 or $500. And even though it was a screamer, I still had slight buyers remorse for spending that much...

When building a new system or upgrading video cards, I used shop in the $300 (±$50) range. I think I bought one close to $400 once. The last card I bought was about 1.5-2 years ago when my GPU suddenly died. I had a GTX 470 at the time, which I think was $300+ when I bought it new. It was running everything I had maxed out or close to it. I had an old GTX 260 laying around to use while I shopped for a new one. I was surprised to still able to play most games maxed out with that old card, so I didn't see the need for a new $300 card. I ended up buying a GTX 660OC for under $200.